Tribute or Rip Off? Well, I’ve no line on that really but I do like the frequent tongue-in-cheek (non-subtle) popular culture references that CMON play with when creating survivor characters for their Zombicide games. Zombicide Black Plague is no exception (I couldn’t wait to paint up the Monty Python chaps).
Last year I tackled a further batch of survivors. Still quite a few to go. A lot of competition for painting time going on though, especially with Conan in the pipeline which itself has been supplanted as the ‘focus’ by Mythic Battles Pantheon… Oh well. At least I curbed some build up of the plastic mountain by selling on Zombicide Black Plague Green Horde and Massive Darkness as soon as those KSs arrived. And then Rising Sun arrived. Oh dear.
In no particular order…
“Lady Faye” – Snow White (Kirsten Stewart) from Snow White and The Huntsman“Lady Faye” – Snow White (Kirsten Stewart) from Snow White and The Huntsman“Hitch the Bard” – Jareth the Goblin King (David Bowie) from Labyrinth“Hitch the Bard” – Jareth the Goblin King (David Bowie) from Labyrinth“Piper the ‘Werewolf'” – Isabeau (Michelle Pfeffer) from Ladyhawke
I’ve enjoyed painting up quite a host of the ‘plastic playing pieces’ that I got with Zombicide Black Plague (see related posts). As I’ve mentioned on various posts the quality of the miniatures included with this type of board game has come on in leaps and bounds in the recent past and Conan the Board Game is no exception.
The KS pledge turned up last year but I’ve been a bit slower in tackling the miniatures (still working on the ZBP stuff too). But I thought I should at least paint up the main characters from the core box below. Far less cartoony than the ZBP counterparts, they will easily do double-duty in other Fantasy systems/settings.
Over the last few years the offerings from a range of creators such as CMoN and Monolith/Mythic to name a couple have spoilt the table top gamer for choice and quality. The range of the miniatures in some of these games are very impressive and the quality is only getting better (looking at you Mythic Battles and Joan of Arc).
I had already had a run at eating into the plastic pile that was Zombicide Black Plague with the core box characters and the whimsical troop of tribute-Knights. Last summer I attempted to dig further chunks out of the pile. This first offering are the player characters found in the Paul Bonner Special Guest box. It is the only guest box which appealed to me at the time of the Kickstarter offering loads of character and a few minis that would not be out of place in a good-olde-fantasy-bash.
It seems apt to follow on from my last post with this one, featuring character’s from one of the funniest, cleverest films of all time (in my humble opinion) – Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Whilst the film featured no zombies it doesn’t tax the imagination at all to see why Cool Mini or Not chose to include some of the characters from the classic in their Zombicide Black Plague character sets. Only disguised by ‘name’ there is nothing between the look of these and the Python team members. The only draw back is there are only six released – hopefully I could have ended that sentence with “so far” – no idea I’m afraid if there will be more.
Now these are not as ‘fine’ as the relatively recent arrivals on the miniature scene from Studio Miniatures (Medieval Mayhem) but as far as plastic board game miniatures are concerned they are rather very good indeed. There are some annoyingly positioned mold lines – straight through Sir Bedevere’s face spring to mind – but apart from that pretty good poses. Some painted up better than others but that’s down to yours truly and not the minis themselves.
I’ll admit this now – if you ask me for a game of Zombicide Black Plague and expect me to turn up with my set ‘completely painted’ I’m afraid you will be disappointed. Maybe in 2020.
As I said recently I remain well impressed by the quality of the miniatures that come with CMON games. Whilst some are slightly cartoony (which I don’t mind personally) the Black Plague miniatures would easily double-duty for other 28mm fantasy skirmish games. (Coming soon post – the Monty Python and the Holy Grail characters as the basis for a Frostgrave warband). Indeed, I was pleased to see on a recent visit to the Falkirk Wargames Club that both character and zombie models from Black Plague were being happily used for Frostgrave encounters.
Rambling aside, here are the based-set characters that come with Zombicide Black Plague. As you can probably see, I’ve just kept to the colour scheme from the game artwork so that they tie in with the character cards.
